‘Hmmm. I see.’ Niger stroked his bearded chin, looking at Albinus with a calculating expression. ‘Military and political advantages combined, eh? Very well, Tribune Belletor, my colleague and I will give your proposal due consideration and inform you as to our decision in due course. Any more questions? No? Very well gentlemen, go back to your cohorts and ensure that your men are in prime condition and ready to fight. Here’s your vine stick, First Spear Secundus.’
The Tungrian cohorts marched from Porolissum at dawn three days later, heading down the military road that followed the line of the Knife Mountains to the south-west in the company of the Thracian archers who were ordered to reinforce the defence at Stone Fort, while Belletor’s mismatched force bought up the rear. The Sarmatae horsemen rode in a straggling mass at the column’s rear, as immune to any form of marching discipline as had been the case since their enlistment.
‘I presume your tribune’s riding with his new best friends, perched up on that horse of his like some kind of conquering general?’
Julius had dropped back to the rear of his men and by happy chance had found First Spear Sergius marching at the head of his legionaries with a dark and foreboding look. The two men were now marching together with their cloaks wrapped about them to fend off the bitterly cold wind.
‘Indeed he is. Since he managed to persuade Legatus Niger to put him on the right bank of the river for this march down to Lakeside Fort, he’s been puffing and preening like a man preparing to ride through Rome with the rose petals floating down around him.’ Sergius shook his head and spat on the road’s verge. ‘I’ve tried to point out to him that he has no idea as to their real loyalties, but he’s like a man besotted with his new wife. All I get back is “my tribesmen this” and “my tribesmen that”, and no concern at all for his regular soldiers.’ He pointed to Julius’s boots, their new fur linings visible around the ankle. ‘Our boots are stuffed with straw, not rabbit like yours. The storeman told Belletor that your men had already taken everything they had to spare, and since he didn’t have a legatus supporting him he was forced to walk away empty handed. He’s got fur linings in his boots mind you, and a nice fur cloak. He was given them by his bloody Sarmatae.’
The two men marched in silence for a moment, enjoying the crisp autumn air and the constant rattle of hobnails on the road’s cobbled surface.
‘They’re decent enough scouts though?’
Sergius grimaced reluctant agreement.
‘So it seems. You saw just as well as I did what they brought back with them from their patrol over the mountains.’
The deciding factor in Niger’s decision had been a patrol that Belletor had sent over the mountains, with orders to range along their northern slopes in search of enemy scouts. The thirty-man party had returned with two empty saddles, but with the heads of half a dozen dead tribesmen dangling from their saddle horns, and the legatus had been an instant convert to the idea of their being used alongside the First Minervia’s regulars. Julius nodded.
‘Exactly. I may not have very much respect for your tribune, but it does seem as if he’s picked a winner for once.’
The twin detachments ground their way to the south-west at a fast pace, reaching Forest View as the sun was dipping towards the horizon. Ushered into the sizeable marching camp alongside the fort’s walls, more usually used by several legion cohorts at a time, the Tungrians found themselves alongside men from a cohort of auxiliary infantry whose title excited a good deal of comment. Marcus overheard Morban explaining it to one of the younger men of the Fifth Century.
‘First Britannica? You know what that means, don’t you? These are men who’ve descended from the tribesmen who were enlisted in Britannia when the legions were recruiting for the wars in Dacia a hundred years ago. What’s the odds of them having come from somewhere near our old fort at The Hill, eh? I’ll give you five to one. .’
As it turned out the Britons were welcoming enough, but it had seemed that in truth they were no more from Britannia than the majority of the Tungrians were really from the farmland around the city of Tungrorum. A hard-faced veteran stepped forward to greet the standard bearer and his hopeful companion.
‘Yeah, my granddad was from Britannia. My dad told me that his old man volunteered for service at a time when the province was right peaceful, so he and another five hundred bluenoses were shipped out here to keep the locals in order.’
Morban thanked him and turned back to the young soldier, sliding the man’s stake money into his purse with well-practised speed.
‘Grandfathers don’t count, I’m afraid.’
Scaurus and Julius went looking for the Britons’ prefect in company with Belletor and Sergius, and the four of them walked into the fort to where they knew the headquarters building would be, given that its layout was prescribed by army regulations. Scaurus tapped at the wall of a barrack block with his knuckle as they passed.
‘The fort may be built to the standard design, but the materials they’ve put it up with aren’t. These men obviously live under a serious threat; you only have to look at the way their buildings are constructed to see that.’
The barrack was built with walls of stone, and the roof was an expanse of thick slate tiles. Wherever wood was used, in doors and windows, the openings were both recessed and protected as much as possible by overhanging stone lintels, designed to prevent a fire arrow from striking the timber. The four men found the fort’s commander, a harassed-looking veteran centurion, snatching a quick meal in the fort’s headquarters building. He pulled up chairs for them and then called for more food and wine.
‘I’ve only got two centuries, gentlemen, enough to stand guard and prevent the locals from ransacking the place while our backs are turned. The bulk of the cohort is concentrated further down the valley at Stone Fort, along with the Second Britannorum. That’s the spot where two valleys come together, so any attacker from the north has to pass through a narrow point in the valley, almost a gorge in truth. If we can’t stop an attacker there then we’re not going to be able to hold them anywhere else, and from here it’s an easy enough march to Napoca.’ He smiled knowingly at the tribunes. ‘And if you think this fort’s well constructed, you want to see the job Tribune Leontius has made of Stone Fort!’
The three cohorts marched on down the valley the next morning, along the road that paralleled the river’s winding path. Another hour’s march brought them within sight of the second of the three forts defending the valley, and Julius stared at the defences arrayed around its walls with a whistle of appreciation.
‘Now there, Tribune, is a fort that’s been set up by a man who knows his trade.’
Commanding the narrowest spot in the valley’s length, the fort’s walls were taller and longer than was usual, clearly big enough to house considerably more strength than the single five-hundred-man cohort that was the usual garrison’s complement. Even from a mile’s distance the structure was evidently built from stone rather than timber. Heavy towers were set on every corner, and the road ran into the fort’s eastern side through a massive stone double-doored gatehouse flanked by two more towers.
‘Are those bolt throwers?’
The first spear followed his tribune’s pointing hand and shook his head.
‘It’s hard to say with all that protection.’
The towers were topped by shallow wooden roofs set low enough that the heavy weapons’ crews would barely have sufficient headroom to work, a small enough price to pay for the resulting protection from enemy bowshot. As the Tungrians drew nearer they realised that the towers were indeed occupied by bolt throwers, one on each corner of the fort, and that the weapons’ crews were tracking their approach. Julius stared darkly up at them, shaking his head in irritation.
‘Very funny. If I find out that those things are loaded then I’m going to tear off someone’s head and shit down his neck. An accidental shot at this range would pin three or four men together.’
The ground to either side of the roa
d was studded with lilies, the stake-filled pits that would deny an attacker any safe footing other than the road itself, and channel them into the bolt throwers’ killing zone. A deep ditch stretched across the valley’s four-hundred-pace width, a hundred paces in front of the fort’s rear wall. Julius nodded approvingly again, his ire at the bolt-thrower crews distracted by the defences.
‘Nice work. A ditch deep enough and steep enough on the far side to have a man climbing on all fours to get out of it, with a four-foot wall for the defenders on the far side and a nice little surprise at the bottom, no doubt.’
Scaurus squinted down into the ditch as they crossed the wooden bridge that spanned the gap, nodding in agreement.
‘So I see. And if this is how well they’ve chosen to defend the back door, one wonders what the side facing an enemy attack looks like?’
‘So you’re to march down the valley to Lakeside Fort on either side of the river looking for trouble, are you? That’s quite extraordinarily adventurous for Pescennius Niger, unless of course he’s been chivvied into taking a risk by his colleague Albinus!’ The tribune commanding Stone Fort laughed uproariously, tipping his head towards the other British cohort’s prefect. ‘And I thought my colleague here and I had drawn the short straw, but at least we’ve got a nice thick layer of stonework to hide behind!’
Scaurus shared a smile with him.
‘At least my men will get to sleep under proper roofs tonight, and with stoves to thaw their feet out.’
Leontius nodded.
‘Indeed. I’m sorry not to have any better hospitality to offer you, but as you can see, Stone Fort is rather spartan in its construction. No bath house for us, just enough barracks for half a legion and every other bit of spare space given over to storage. On the brighter side, we have enough rations in our storehouses to provision five thousand men for a fortnight, so nobody’s going to go hungry, just as long as they’re happy with bread and dried meat of a somewhat dubious quality. And let me tell you, gentlemen, your arrival is most welcome, not to mention the archers, given I expect to have a pack of angry Sarmatae dogs baying for blood on the other side of my western ditch within a day or two. What word do we have from Porolissum? Where do the grown-ups expect the Sarmatae will land the first punch?’
Scaurus smiled at his colleague’s irreverence.
‘The legati are convinced that any attack up the valley here will only be a feint. They have intelligence from within the Sarmatae camp, it seems. Domitius Belletor and I are ordered to reconnoitre forward from this position and attempt to locate the enemy. The ‘grown-ups’ have decided to convince Purta they’ve taken his bait by risking a couple of thousand men in a probe down this valley.’
Leontius’s face reflected his cynicism.
‘You do realise that in the event of any serious Sarmatae attack here you’ll be like a pair of boxers leading with your chins? Where I come from, Tribune, we have the saying that if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. So in this case, colleagues, whether the legati are in receipt of secret intelligence or not, we’ll be treating any barbarian force that comes up the valley as the real thing. I don’t know about you gentlemen, but this country isn’t like any other I’ve served in, not with tens of thousands of men like those barbarian horsemen you marched in with, all spoiling for a fight not fifty miles to the north. And what starts out as a feint to deceive us might end up becoming the main line of attack overnight. You might just find yourselves marching your men head-on into an army of twenty thousand of the buggers. Go down the valley by all means, but I’d suggest that you be ready to come back up it as fast as you can, and join us here to defend the pass, if by some misfortune you find yourselves toe to toe with the entire Sarmatae nation. And now gentlemen, a toast!’ He raised his cup. ‘To secret intelligence! Let’s just pray it’s as accurate as it is secret!’
If the previous week had been cold, the next dawn found the Tungrian sentries clustered around their braziers in search of whatever heat was to be had whenever the duty centurion’s attention was elsewhere. A bitter wind was blowing from the north, sweeping curtains of snow down from the mountains onto the fort, and for a time it seemed that the weather would prevent the cohorts from fulfilling their mission. However, and to great disgust, shortly after the soldiers had taken their breakfast and were happily anticipating a day doing nothing more taxing than shivering in their tents, the storm front cleared away to leave Stone Fort under a clear blue sky and with temperatures low enough to freeze the water in the horse troughs solid. Scaurus gathered his centurions together in his quarter and issued the orders that their men were dreading.
‘We march. The legati are depending on us to deliver on our promise to make the Sarmatae believe that there’s a legion defending this pass, and deliver it we will. Make sure your men are wearing every piece of clothing they can muster, not that they’ll need much encouragement in these temperatures.’
Watched by the Britons, the cohorts marched out over the fort’s western gate and across the wooden bridge that, as with the eastern approach, was the only way over the ditch that had been dug across the valley’s full width.
‘What stops an attacker from just taking to the hills to either side and working their way around the ditch?’
Overhearing the question from one of his brighter soldiers, Marcus answered it despite Quintus’s look of disapproval.
‘What stops them from doing that, soldier, is the fact that the Britons have had weeks to prepare the ground. Their pioneers have felled enough trees up the hillsides and planted enough sharpened stakes in their branches to make an impenetrable barrier, which means that the only way to get to the fort’s other side is to go that way. .’ He pointed at a side valley to their right. ‘But that means taking a long detour around to the north, the best part of a day’s march. Titus and his boys in the Tenth Century were looking quite jealous when they saw all those fallen trees yesterday.’
The Tungrians crossed the frozen river to reach the left bank, their hobnailed boots slipping and sliding on the smooth surface, while the First Minervia’s cohort drove on down the right bank with their native cavalry in close attendance.
‘If only I’d known, I could have offered odds on my being able to walk on water. I would have made a right killing,’ said Morban.
‘Ah yes, but you have taken a bet on the very same subject, if you recall?’
Marcus smiled at the momentary look of fear that crossed his standard bearer’s face as Morban recalled the moment when he had been provoked into offering his centurion a bet of heroic proportions during the march north. Marcus turned his attention back to his men, some of whom were already clearly troubled by their numb toes, despite the fur linings in their boots.
‘They’ll live, as long as they keep moving. I had a good look at their feet before we marched this morning, and there’s not one of them with a serious problem. Those poor bastards have it worse, I’d say.’ Quintus pointed across the river’s thirty-foot width at the labouring legionaries on its far side. ‘Some of them look like they’re already struggling. .’
As they watched, a mounted patrol of Belletor’s Sarmatae went forward at the trot, the riders apparently impervious to the cold in their thick furs, quickly vanishing from view around a bend in the river. As the two forces made their way down the river’s course, the valley widened, broadening from barely a hundred paces on either side of the frozen stream to three times as much in the space of a mile. Cresting a slight rise, Marcus found himself staring down the valley’s length for the best part of two miles, squinting into the light of the winter sun as it reflected off the broad, icy expanse of a lake a mile or so distant. A soldier ran down the cohort’s line and saluted him.
‘Centurion, sir! First Spear says we’ll march as far as that lake and then we’ll take a rest stop.’
Marcus nodded and waved the man on down the line before turning to call out an order to his chosen man.
‘Quintus! They’re all yours, I’m going back for a chat with Qadir and Dubnus!’
Waiting until the Eighth Century reached the place where he had stopped, flexing his toes experimentally and finding them disquietingly numb, he fell in alongside Dubnus with a grimace of shared discomfort. The Briton laughed at him.
‘I’d forgotten you’ve yet to experience the joys of campaigning in a proper winter. How are you finding it, apart from the blueness of your toes?’
The Roman shrugged.
‘It seems I’m doomed to always either be too hot or too cold, so I suppose it’s best just to ignore the weather and think more about the job at hand. Anyway, there’s something I wanted to test out when we get to that lake, to see if the histories are true in what they tell us? I’ve just reminded Morban of the wager he made with me on the subject while we were marching up from Apulum, and he looked decidedly sick when I raised the matter.’
When they reached the lake the soldiers milled about, unwilling to subject themselves to more discomfort by sitting on the freezing ground, while Marcus and Dubnus, joined by an inquisitive Qadir and a nervous Morban, trailed by a few inquisitive soldiers, made their way onto the ice. Across the lake’s expanse they could see the First Minervia’s legionaries shuffling about disconsolately, First Spear Sergius clearly having decided to rest his men to keep the two advances aligned. The remaining Sarmatae horsemen had dismounted, but as usual showed no sign of mixing with the soldiers.
‘Buggered if I know what we’re doing out here on the bloody ice!’
Sanga turned to the soldier Scarface with an irritated expression.
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